(1) Field of the Invention
The invention pertains generally to monitoring private computer networks. More specifically, the invention relates to generating aggregate statistics for devices associated with user-based groups of private networks.
(2) Description of the Related Art
In order to keep up with ever-increasing guest demands, it is common practice in the hospitality industry to outsource technology requirements such as hotel high speed internet access (HSIA) and digital entertainment systems to an external vendor. Hoteliers benefit from reduced costs and installation times by purchasing a guaranteed turn-key solution and are able to focus on their core business rather than wasting resources designing and supporting an in-house entertainment system. External vendors profit from developing a robust, customizable and feature extensive design and then selling it to multiple hotel properties.
A typical entertainment system involves a private local area network (LAN) installed within a hotel and separated from the public Internet using a gateway device. To provide adequate security, the gateway generally includes firewall functionality and ensures only authorized guests of the hotel are allowed to access the Internet. The system may further provide other features including guest billing and bandwidth control, and the private LAN may be combined with entertainment devices in the hotel such as in-room set-top boxes (STBs) to provide video-on-demand (VOD) and other capabilities to guests. In this way, the vendor may provide the hotel with a fully featured network and entertainment system. Although the vendor may essentially be selling the same system to different hotels, the onscreen look and feel and various features may be customized to allow hotels to differentiate themselves from competitors.
Because guest satisfaction may be negatively affected by poor in-room HSIA and entertainment system performance, it is desirable that the system provide feedback to the customer hotel regarding usage statistics and status information. This feedback may be helpful to the hotel when considering whether to upgrade the system. For example, the hotel may wish to know what percentage of its Internet bandwidth pipe was utilized at peak times or how many VOD movies were ordered by guests at different times of the day. Likewise, the hotel may also wish to know if there were any recent problems automatically detected by the system. To provide the hotel with feedback of the installed network, different vendor systems currently include reporting tools such as daily email reports for summary statistics and/or web-based console access for real-time statistics. In this way, administrators of each hotel may monitor the status of the installed system.
One problem with the current state of the art is it is cumbersome for owners or administrators of multiple hotel properties to monitor the network statistics of all the properties under their supervision. For example, a particular group of hotels may all be owned and administered under a single entity such as a common owner or chain headquarters. Because each hotel's system has a separate reporting tool that only concerns itself with monitoring devices on its own private network, it is difficult to quickly observe the overall status of the entire group of properties as a whole. Also, comparing individual statistics of devices of different hotel private networks is manually intensive as the desired data from each property must be collected and organized by an operator.